Emergentist View on Generative Narrative Cognition: Considering Principles of the Self-Organization of Mental Stories

Abstract

We consider the essence of human intelligence to be the ability to mentally (internally) construct a world in the form of stories through interactions with external environments. Understanding the principles of this mechanism is vital for realizing a human-like and autonomous artificial intelligence, but there are extremely complex problems involved. From this perspective, we propose a conceptual-level theory for the computational modeling of generative narrative cognition. Our basic idea can be described as follows: stories are representational elements forming an agent’s mental world and are also living objects that have the power of self-organization. In this study, we develop this idea by discussing the complexities of the internal structure of a story and the organizational structure of a mental world. In particular, we classify the principles of the self-organization of a mental world into five types of generative actions, i.e., connective, hierarchical, contextual, gathering, and adaptive. An integrative cognition is explained with these generative actions in the form of a distributed multiagent system of stories.